a way of happening

i'm not sayin', i'm just sayin'

2011-09-30T11:09:00.001-05:00

excuses for not making amends

2011-09-29T23:55:00.002-05:00

self-medication

2011-09-28T15:11:00.001-05:00

T-Wrecks

2011-08-09T16:41:00.005-05:00

true things:

2011-07-25T19:34:00.005-05:00

you get what you pay for (couches, apartments, new cheap towel shredded in washing machine)
old habits die hard (greed, self-pity, kindness)
we are creatures of habit (personal history, with few exception, repeats itself)
patience is the greatest virtue (hope, good things come to those who wait, violence is not the answer)

artificial flavor

2010-10-11T22:04:00.000-05:00

.2 miles, good condition

2010-10-04T17:19:00.001-05:00

baby, baby, baby, oh

2010-10-02T16:07:00.000-05:00

ways to avoid death in event of nautical disaster

2010-10-01T22:55:00.008-05:00

[also age 8-ish?]

-By jet pack

-By plane

-By joining sad-faced people in lifeboat

-By using smoke-stack to boost you into lifeboat

-By leaping off now-vertical ship into lifeboat

-By dolphin

-By sliding and/or diving into water in perfect form

-By taking refuge on iceberg

-By not slipping when climbing said iceberg

-By flare/firework

-By holding split ends of ship together with pure willpower

-By being a marine animal

basically, this blog exists so i can talk about myself

2010-09-30T22:36:00.006-05:00

[age 8-ish?]

box 1: Billy - "I am going through time."

box 2: Billy - "Goody I am in dinosaur land"

Small dinosaur on large dinosaur's head - "Go dad Go."

box 3: Billy - "Help! I am an egg."

Nemesis - "And I am an egg napper."

"It's like pants, for your antlers!"

2010-09-30T00:05:00.003-05:00

the story of this body over time

2010-09-14T22:48:00.012-05:00

Who or what is the 'self' we believe in? Is it an accumulation of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the stories others tell about us? Do we become these stories? Can we lose these stories, or alter them?

My current Plan For Life is to get a master's degree in clinical and mental health psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist or school counselor or teacher or Pretty Good Person. Reasons for doing so include: good counseling experiences and an interest in stories. I know enough about depression to know it is not intentional, it is very real, it is scary, and in its worst moments indescribably horrible for you and anyone who loves you. Biological and environmental contributors to it are undeniable, but I do think our stories of ourselves have quite a bit to do with some depressions.

21st century-ers are as inquisitive as we are skeptical, think believing should follow experience, and certainty is more or less the end of thought and creativity, which in a way is death. Stories are in our shoes, miles flown, and resumes, taking a stab in the dark to say what we are and what we want to be, and soon enough we find a pattern and claim a story as ourselves. We tend to want some inner unchangeable self which we discover rather than create, but I think identities are more flexible, we value becoming more than being.

Maybe the goal of therapy is to hear our stories retold. The same facts, the same job, the same failed relationships, the same body, this time with a different story. Hopelessness is a story without inclination, missing imagination for what life could be without him or with that disease. We need a tilt, a shift, what Kay Ryan calls "tinkering with the fit / of what's available. / As though what is is / right already but / askew." Maybe loving someone means wishing them a good story, and therapy and conversation exist to help us believe it. To save each other by teaching us to save ourselves, giving each other a little lift so we can hold whatever it is we've been trying to hear.

artwork

name-calling, small worlds, and selective stupidity

2010-08-30T21:55:00.006-05:00

This won't have much form to it, but Miss April Lundberg told me she checks the blog and has been disappointed by the lack of posts, and it is exciting someone reads this! So this is for you, and please enjoy the inspiring picture found by image searching 'potential':

Here I am all out-of-college-y, and for the first time in my life few people I see on a regular basis could be considered students. College and the schooling leading up to it takes place in a land of fairies and empowerment in which ideas are thrown about as if they have importance, could actually work, and using time creating and tweaking these ideas is a self-evident good.

In other words, entry-level work is killing my brain. Faulkner won't help you run a cash register and mop floors (though he could probably describe it quite beautifully). In the last few months I have met people who, including but not limited to, believe that: Bush is hiding Bin Laden, the moon landing was a hoax, Obama is the antichrist and/or a muslim, Jews control the world, gay people want to take over the world, gay people could be straight if they wanted to, gay people don't exist, scientists are desperately trying to hide evidence the world is 6,000 years old, and 9/11 was an inside job. 'Stupid' to my coworker is dropping a chicken kabob on the floor, and going to hookah bars when you could smoke cheaper at home. 'Stupid' to me is staying in America when you hate every part of it, and swearing you will hate Jews till the day you die.

I instinctively distrust any us vs. them conspiracy theory type of talk. It ways, "please, please give us something to be angry about, feel superior for, be in the know about, something we can ignore normal moral principles fighting for (i.e. peace, charity, neighborly love), a damsel in distress we can die defending." We are a violent people, and nothing feeds our lust for being the suffering hero who enacts justice better than simplified ideas of a very small world. More or less, we don't stop playing good cops vs. bad cops and calling each other names in elementary school. "No, you're stupid."

It's not truth we're after. Power maybe, affirmation, a sense of purpose. Maybe we are all versions of each others' stupidity. Maybe trying to find a way better than prejudice is prejudice. If you keep your world small, it works. It's something you can have not just think about. Knowing you will never know seems the more honest option, but it's its own bias. Maybe our worlds aren't small enough. What if we helped people without justifying it or criticizing why they need it? Give water to the thirsty, no 'if's 'and's or 'because's. Sounds familiar, though I swear I can feel my brain going into hibernation from lack of use/argument.

"Memory closes down its dark waters."

2010-05-30T15:44:00.015-05:00

In my three years at college, about the only idea I couldn't give up was that people had value. I am a bad nihilist even though I talked like one, felt all the appropriate misery and despair, and found myself quite seriously unable to live.

Step 1 - If I want to live I must choose to find a way to. Maybe not the truth, but something that enables me to be more than a potato.
Step 2 - If I need people to have value to live, the existence of a God is the most obvious if not the only way to make this possible.
Step 3 - If people have value, they should be treated as if they have value. God is responsible for the creation of the world, so he is responsible for how people are treated in it.
Step 4 - There are terrible, terrible heartbreaks, famines, floods, greed, envy yada yada Ivan Karamazov -> suffering cannot be undone-> free choice has too high of a cost-> God set things up this way without our consent-> life is still the same-> pouting-> rut

I had a conversation with a mentor about why despair seems so much more real than happiness. It's better company. It lasts longer, seems to be the default. To say suffering has a purpose is consoling ourselves, and it doesn't work very well. But what if the same way we forget general happiness when we experience specific pain, after death we will forget what has happened to us? What if when we become the person we need to become and make peace with ourselves we will finally be able to move on?

As ridiculous as I feel doing this, I'm going to appeal to the LOST finale (spoilers!) because it explains this really well. The survivors of the plane crash have spent the last years discovering the worst and best in themselves when put in extreme circumstances. Through this, the people on the island become more dear to each other than anyone they've known. After each of the characters dies, some on the island, some years later, they create a sort of parallel purgatorial universe in which they can find each other before entering the afterlife. While in this between-world, each character has a moment of enlightenment where all at once they remember their real life, the one on the island. When they've seen who they have become and how deep and whole their connection to each other is, they are ready to leave their lives behind and move on.

I can stomach a Christianity without hell. Maybe we're reincarnated until we reach enlightenment or awareness or salvation or whatever you want to call it, maybe the world is only a space to be in until we reach it - I don't know. But I like the idea that people are too valuable have finite crimes held against them infinitely. I like that it gives purpose to the world without punishing it for being the way it is. I like the idea that we can become more than we are, that nobody is left behind, and nobody dies alone because we will travel together with our loved ones toward the bliss that is forgetting. I'm okay with that.

angers, hurts, fears

2010-05-16T16:10:00.005-05:00

Maybe starting with something already finished will get me writing/blogging again. Here goes. One thing my counselor had me do is make a list of my angers, hurts, and fears. I thought it was interesting how it turned out so here's the results with the exception of hurts because I don't know who will read this.

in no particular order...

angers:

bad reasoning
willful ignorance
evangelism
scare tactics
apologetics
patriotism
Fox news
wasteful living
parking lots
pollution
greed
insensitivity
war
racism
"justice"
entitlement
American Idol culture
groupthink
pedophiles
impatience
giving up on people
leaving people behind
the martyr complex

fears:

being alone
hating my job
depression
divorce
slow painful death
wasps
becoming an alcoholic
god existing
god not existing
discontentment
being raped
entropy
silence
things falling apart
suicide
driving people away
not caring
ruining my own life
my stubbornness
letting go of guilt
letting go
that I am in love with sadness
giving up on people
leaving people behind
the martyr complex

now it's your turn.

In Every Story She Writes [revised]

2009-10-22T20:55:00.000-05:00

the sons have red hair that won't cooperate,
chase unlucky toads, and lose annual footraces
to clever and unhappy daughters.

Mothers wear plaid aprons and listen
to political radio programs, slamming spatulas
on the counter and cursing those goddamn
commies when the kids are outside.

Fathers come home from work early or not at all,
and spend weekends at jazz clubs
regretting that they stopped playing bass.

First loves will end for foreseeable reasons
that daughters are about to explain in a cafe
when the final sentence reads, “Then a bomb went off”;

death, as if by principle, takes no enlightened turn.

Old Wishes [re-lineated, as image so the indents will show up]

2009-10-22T17:53:00.005-05:00

2009-09-07T22:50:00.015-05:00

Oh, how I miss the days
of the Bubonic Plagues,
my neighbors was in graves
and didn't ask for eggs.

Chin-Wag: An Interlude

2009-07-19T15:03:00.026-05:00

Maybe we could go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury because a pilgrimage there is supposed to be healing and I need healing and you probably do too. We could bring horses and medieval capes and baguettes and strangers and tell stories to entertain each other the whole way there and whoever tells the best one gets a free meal and drinks. Maybe we could tell stories about ourselves but I'm not sure we could do it in a way that is true so maybe it is better to make them up.

Let's pretend we are on the road to Canterbury now. I am going to tell you a story and you pretend you are walking and in England and maybe it will help you with things. Maybe it is talking that is healing and not walking on a road at all because why would sore feet and going more places make you better? But I think you should pretend you are walking just in case.

Okay this is it:

Once there was a girl who decided she would never wake up. Right after dinner she climbed the ladder to her room in the loft, changed into her favorite pink nightgown, and put a quilt on her bed so she wouldn't get cold when winter came in a few months. After crawling under the covers, she blew out the candle by her bed, closed her eyes, and right away she started dreaming.

She had the most grand adventures in her dreams but she was never scared even when things were very dangerous because she knew it was a dream. In one of her dreams she and a blacksmith and a monk had to protect a village against a pack of wolves and the only weapon they had was one sword. In another dream, she was a princess who wanted to learn magic even though it was forbidden. Late one night she cut off all her hair, dressed like a servant boy, and ran away from the castle with her pet bird. She might have had to hit one guard over the head real hard so he wouldn't squeal. Her favorite dream was when she was a deer and spent all day in a meadow drinking from the stream and running so fast her ears blew back against her head.

Sometimes she had dreams about her family. Like the one where her sister married the most handsome man in the most beautiful church in the middle of a field and there was white flowers and music and dancing and a cake as tall as you can stretch your arms wide and grandparents and cousins and even her old boyfriend because they forgave each other and are friends now. She dreamed her brother became a judge who always knew who the bad men were and the whole town went to his birthday party and shook his hand and built a brand new library for his house.

The one dream she did not like was when her mother and father died of a coughing disease. Even though they were old and couldn't hear what their children or grandchildren said and it was good they died together so they didn't have to live alone, if you saw her sleeping you would have seen tears making her hair and pillow wet. After this dream she did not know if she liked dreaming anymore but she had been asleep so long she did not remember how to wake up. She had more dreams about waterfalls and fairies and climbing trees and swimming underwater like a fish but it was hard to forget the one dream even after she had been dreaming for a very long time.

That is all of my made up story and I do not know if it has a good ending and now it is your turn to tell a story.

[p.s. now I've used the label 'fiction'! hooray!]

Chin-Wag Part 3: Little Gidding

2009-07-15T12:50:00.020-05:00

[warning: the picture is not a picture of Little Gidding. I will upload the right photos when I have my computer again]

Little Gidding is a place in the countryside of Cambridgeshire and T.S. Eliot said nice things about it most importantly that it is "the world's end" and is "the intersection of the timeless moment" and isn't that a nice thing to say about a place so why not go see it? There is a group of thirty British people who walk five miles to get to Little Gidding on an annual pilgrimage and it just happened to be the day you came. If you get a little lost on your way because people who have tongue rings do not give very good directions, you'll miss most of the service but will still get to have tea. You might meet a nice man from Ecuador and his friend who is named either Bonny or Johnny or Lonnie and has bad teeth and doesn't know English well so you just stand by him weirdly until one of you leaves. Did you know the word weird comes from the Medieval word Wyrd which means fate? I think that is interesting.

The haystacks in the field are impossible to climb and you might rub your eyes and regret it a lot when you learn you are allergic to hay. The flies will get bored and leave when they realize you are not cow poop. The wind will be cold and strong because it blows across so many fields to get to where you are. There are trees but mostly fields and the sky is so big and open that you will feel like the patient etherized upon a table but without the etherization or whatever it's called.

Even if you are not reading Hamlet you will feel alone. Maybe "what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning" so it is okay you don't have any great thoughts and only feel like an ant like Charles the First might have when he visited here before he was executed. You might think about Van Gogh who shot himself behind a haystack in a wheat field. At first I thought it must have been storming then too and he was also watching the clouds move across the sky towards him and feeling the rain blow on his face and the wind was making it hard to stand but then I decided it was sunny. When it gets dark like that you want to shout at the sky and survive and prove you can beat it so I bet there were birds chirping instead.

It turns out you can climb the haystacks and you only picked the wrong one before but your friend can show you the right one. When you get to the top you will wish you had memorized poetry with bad weather like when people curse storms but all you know is "Blow foul winds, blow!" from when King Lear was on the heath and since you don't know the rest of the speech you just yell "Lear on the heath!" which is not very effective. You can try various Attempts to Contain the World poses and your friend will do the Calmly and Strongly Confronting Life pose which says a lot about her. You can talk about that more when you are safe inside the room made especially for short people.

The next day you can visit Steeple Gidding and see that it is disappointingly well-kept and visited too often for it to be cool even in the slightest. Be sure to talk to the cows on the way there because they are nice and will look at you for a long time and not even get bored. On the walk back you will remember the old man from the bus ride who held a photograph of a row of houses and traced the bushes connecting the front yards with his finger. I guessed that it is where he grew up because the photographs were from the 40s and he was about 70 but maybe it was where his wife grew up and she was too sick or dead to make the trip. Either way he was very careful with the photographs and kept them in a yellow envelope. What was crazy was that the hair on his arms was still blonde. I noticed because he had tattoos that were only blobs because the ink ran together and at the same time he had shoes that velcro shut. Weird.

Today a different old guy walked by me and two people all reading Canterbury Tales in Port Meadow in Oxford and he said "By jove! Look at those swots" and we smiled because he was smiling even though we didn't know what he meant. Swot is British slang for a studious scholar, but the word is "often used derisively" and maybe I should be offended but when British people talk it is best to smile and laugh or say something witty.

Chin-Wag Part 2: Tintagel

2009-07-07T14:05:00.016-05:00

Hello are you there? Okay I will tell you about Tintagel. The cliffs are hard to get to and you will have to carry your backpack to the hostel so pack light and maybe exercise so you will be ready. The cliffs are very steep and if you take pictures they look like they are from a helicopter even though you are only standing on the ground. I would say you can see for miles but since it is in England I should say kilometers. There is a cave called Merlin's cave and I stole a magic rock from it that I will show you but not let you keep when I get back. Merlin was trapped in the cave by a girl he loved who did not love him back. He is not there anymore or else he did not respond to his name when I yelled it or maybe he is just old or too sad about the girl to talk which could happen.

There are fields that smell like cow poop so be careful where you sit to read unless you like the smell of cow poop or the wind is blowing the other direction or you are too lazy to walk far. Even if you read Hamlet you will not feel alone and that is why Tintagel is a good place. On one cliff you can see fields far away and the beach far below and the sun set over the ocean. After a while the seagulls will fly real close to you and ants will crawl on the same rock you sit on because they trust you. If you watch the ants and trace the lines in the rocks carefully there is as much to see there as in the whole sky and all the blowing grass and the beach. Waves hitting the rocks is a peaceful sound until the sun sets and then it is like moaning but it is getting cold and you should head back anyway.

Late at night you should go to the graveyard. Bring other people too because it is dark and you get lost easy and you want to be friends with them. Be very quiet when you creep past the old bus with the gypsy girl who was playing recorder earlier because now her friends are there for a bonfire and they might be dangerous and it is more fun to sneak. At the graveyard there will be one candle flickering inside the chapel that you can see through a slat in the door and if you are brave you will find an open window and crawl inside and kneel on the stone floor and pray in front of the candle but I am not brave so I don't know if there are ghosts or thieves waiting in there. It is important to stand on top of a stone wall and quote as much poetry as you know to the graves and the moon and the people you are with. Your friends might recite poetry too and the cold wind will make you shiver and the grass will rustle like it is shivering too and be sure to walk back holding at least one friend close because it is more dark than when you left and you don't have a flashlight and even the gypsy has gone to sleep so it must be a bad time of night.

I'm finished talking about Tintagel at least for now.

Chin-Wag Part 1: London, etc.

2009-07-05T14:51:00.034-05:00

Sometimes there is a nice person sitting next to you on the plane from O'Hare to Heathrow who went to College of Dupage but is now from Pheonix. He might be a psychologist who works for the air force and is going to a conference about flight simulators and intuition learned from experience like when a fireman knows everyone should leave a burning building and then the roof collapses after everyone gets out.

Digestives are delicious and good for tummies that hurt and fried eggs are actually sunny-side-up eggs and cars all go the wrong way so watch your back which means look out. There are so many cathedrals with dead kings and saints buried inside them that after a while you don't care anymore. Sometimes the castles and abbeys are in ruins and you can see the sky and clouds because there is no roof. Tintern Abbey is basically a stone jungle gym that would be fun to climb on if people didn't yell at you for it. The only thing that should be spoken at Dover beach is the poem "Dover Beach" because that is everything that needs to be said there but maybe you could play cello if it is not raining.

In London there is a Peter Pan statue that is hard to find, and a Rothko/Turner exhibit at the Tate Britain that is free and if you are there long enough it will make you cry so you should leave if you wear eyeliner and probably just go see Wicked which you shouldn't and I didn't either. The Liberty Bounds is a restaurant with fish and chips for £4.99 and was recommended by the boat tour guide who knew what he was talking about and said one of the bridges was built by women only and is very strong. Large groups of British people smell like cigarettes and alcohol so if you don't like that you should not go there in the first place. "Waiting for Godot" has good words but unless you like words a lot you should not get the twenty percent view of the stage tickets even if it is Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.

If there is a long day trip you should skip it to get a ticket to see "Hamlet" especially if Jude Law is playing Hamlet. If you are alone the couple next to you will buy you coffee because they see you can't leave the line, and the tall man with spikey hair will tell you they live not far from the city and he is an Irish literature professor and his favorite author to teach is James Joyce because the students like him, and the woman with long curly hair will hold his arm and he will kiss her forehead and she will tell you Michael Jackson is dead and would you like to read about it in the paper and have part of my ham sandwich. They will wave at you from the box seats and you will be happy and hope it makes them as happy you. If you are alone your heart will be heavy when the curtain opens and all through the acts because the world is sad enough to make a person go mad and Hamlet and is alone so you should go see him alone.

The Dragon School is a boarding school in Oxford for British schoolchildren and has no dragons or else they hide them very well. If you steer a punting boat badly, you might separate a mother duck from her ducklings and they will swim around confused and you will feel bad about yourself even though you only wanted a close-up picture. Philip Pullman has crazy hair and lives in Oxford with the ducks and will sign a book he wrote that you buy at Borders but does not know Dr. Jacobs who is the person you know that he is most likely to know. A lot of people took a lot of time to replicate C.S. Lewis' house and it probably wasn't necessary.

I have a test tomorrow and should leave but want to tell you about Tintagel which is the most beautiful place in the world at least that I have seen.

mind-forged manacles

2009-06-19T10:48:00.004-05:00

I'm leaving for England today. I'll be back August 7th. Email me. I'm not taking the computer, but will use the library computers in Oxford while we're there for two weeks.

Cheerio.

And now we rise / And we are everywhere.

2009-06-14T21:30:00.012-05:00

Finding certain musicians, like finding certain friends, happens with a sense of arrival. As though you have been practicing for it, the meeting is seamless and instinctive. Maybe it’s the timing that’s right: before would have been to early, later too late, but now is perfect though you can’t quite explain why or even feel like you need to.

All this to say, last night I listened to Nick Drake for the first time. Recorded in two nights, the eleven tracks of Pink Moon last less than a half hour and, with the exception of one piano overdub, has only voice and guitar. It was his third and final released album before an overdose of antidepressants ended his life three years later. Another album, Five Leaves Left is likewise hauntingly world-weary, with bluesy melodies.

Drake’s voice in Pink Moon is weighed with the despair that plagued the final years of his life, while “The Thoughts of Mary Jane” is a lighthearted wondering what a girl is thinking. There is something right about the bareness of emotion. Simplicity is welcoming in a way nothing else can be, like coming home before you learned you need to leave.

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
Someday our ocean
Will find its shore

-from "Time Has Told Me"

From this height

2009-06-07T21:01:00.025-05:00

in this corner it looks like
order, the table

and the ladder meant to be together
guarding a four-legged uncle,

maybe, who collects lamps
and isn’t as gloomy as he pretends.

The salt shaker on a bench, the tin
cup and apple on the cement floor

have the sense of fatedness
lovers long for:

even quirks aligned into a plan.

[photo by Bernard Voïta]

In every story she writes

2009-05-22T19:20:00.035-05:00

the sons have red hair that won't cooperate,
chase unlucky toads, and lose annual footraces
to clever and unhappy daughters.

Mothers wear plaid aprons and listen
to political radio programs, slamming spatulas
on the counter and cursing those goddamn
socialist crazies when the kids are outside.

Fathers come home from work early or not at all.

Lovers, depending on their age, carve
initials into the beam of a house or a tree.
First loves end for foreseeable reasons,

but what happens next is anyone's guess.

One character studies archaeology in Israel, two play
bass in a jazz band and never hum quite on key.

Maybe she realizes she doesn’t want to move to Moab,
or an older couple turns on the TV - but the final
sentence always reads, “Then a bomb went off”;

death, as if by principle, takes no enlightened turn.

music, piano teacher, etc.

2009-05-16T17:12:00.018-05:00

[This might be part of a longer essay. I wrote it while trying to finish "Poetry and the Forgiveness of Everyone," but don't think it matches that essay, so we'll see what happens to it. I'm very unsure about whether I should be writing like this about real people. Maybe I shouldn't post it? hmm.]

My high school piano teacher used to tell stories about her husband, who was also a pianist, and died from a brain tumor while still young. “In winter his hands got so dry, his fingers would crack open when he played too loud,” she told me. “During one concert,” she giggled like a teenager, “he had use a handkerchief to wipe the blood off the piano keys.” She gave me a cassette tape of him playing a concerto with an orchestra, and listening to it I could only wonder if someone in the audience had passed out at the sight of blood, if it hurt his hands to play the cadenza, and if he knew while playing this concert he was going to die.

In what I’m sure was a scandal at the time, they started dating while he was her teacher in college. He was a recent MA graduate, and she was a optimistic and energetic young star at piano, which she practiced constantly, undoubtedly for more reasons than simply liking Liszt. Every so often, she told me stories about their playing duets together, touring Europe, and spending their savings on a grand piano. When I got behind on memorizing my pieces for a competition, she never failed to tell again how her husband wouldn’t work on a piece until two weeks before a performance, and how for those weeks he’d stop practicing only to sleep a few hours and eat.

She gave up grad school and whatever life she could have had as a performing artist to be with him, and forty years later, music was the part of him still living that she could love. I knew I had nothing to do with the way she cried when I played a Beethoven sonata with the dynamics he had marked in a score I borrowed. Ars longa, vita brevis, “Art is long, life is short,” was how she signed her emails, and for her it more than a pithy saying, it was something she took hope in and depended on.

Music can provide a sort of eternal life, a way to commune with the living and the dead through something that is bigger than any of us, and in which we can participate. Visual art does this for some people, religion, poetry, or fiction for others. None of these things can love a person, only remind us of it, give us a common language. For my piano teacher it was music that could shake her, and music specifically because it was bound to a real life experience.

Old Wishes

2009-05-12T00:11:00.006-05:00

[blogger leaves out all the indents...]

They are like a chorus
of children, only
it is always

a rehearsal: they flirt,
knock scores to the
hardwood floor

stab each other
with pencils,
untie shoes

wait for a cue
that will come they
don’t doubt

like mothers about
six o’clock in
the parking lot.

themorningisfilledwiththewonderandgloryofthelord

2009-04-14T00:15:00.016-05:00

wide awake ignorant David dances
joy joy joy hope is new every morning

I too hide in caves but you won’t catch me singing

excavate what you will baby if you're trying
to keep me around bring a hatchet
lantern thirty feet of rope and a shovel

two decades I’ve slipped my way on this rock
your eye’s best mind won’t find my track

I thank no one bide my own time play no
pretty harp for no love am gone before
God-awful watch the sunrise with me breath

freezing their asses on roofs it’s the first
purple-orange rays that scald them worst

ohhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyday
wash that wash that sun away

Horace translations

2009-04-02T00:21:00.006-05:00

[imitations, I should say, from unfortunately difficult English versions I didn't know better before using]

Odes, 1.33 Albi, ne doleas plus nimio memor

Cheer up, Albius. She’s a whore
who left you for a younger man, and isn’t
worth losing your voice over.

Besides, you’re not the only one unloved:

Lycoris likes Cyrus, Cyrus likes Pholoe,
Pholoe’s angry at the whole world.
She’s like a goddamn wolf, that woman.

Don’t blame your ex, it’s Venus’ fault.
As a heartless joke she sets up couples
who have absolutely nothing in common.

I’m lucky: Myrtale lets me buy her stuff,
and I like her pretty well – but I got to say,
her bad moods hit like a tidal wave.

Odes, 3.26 Vixi puellis nuper idoneus

Before I wasn’t ready for love,
and was too good at fighting.

I’m past all that, putting away
my weapons where they can rust.

Venus has got it out for me though,
is breaking down my doors

with crowbars and artillery.
If this is love, it’s terrible.

Do me a favor and slap
that haughty bitch in the face.

The Museum of Peace

2009-03-25T21:37:00.001-05:00

It got its name because no one visits.

Vines have cracked and hidden the marble
walls of every gallery. A tree’s roots overrun
a path where a hall might have been,

and the sculpture of some mother
has been worn to a knob by the wind.

The fallen roof is home to small animals
who step with innocent indifference
on pottery and shriveled canvases.

One man found the ruins and brushed
moss from a bronze shield. Images

of war etched underneath seemed
to come alive: soldiers on horseback
spilling blood in the courtyard, stone

stairs holding the weight of a corpse
with open eyes knowing we must leave,

a commander yelling he can achieve peace.

Edward Hopper, 'Night Windows' (1928)

2009-03-11T23:26:00.007-05:00

Your new life
is a charming apartment
with red furniture -

but you keep one window open
where memories of me dance
in the breeze like a white curtain.

She could never find funny
your uncontrollable laugh
while listening to Verdi’s operas.

Better lighting and classy
restaurants could never beat
reading poetry to pigeons.

She is only taking off
a coral dress, and you
are only drinking more.

You are missing your train stop
for the third time, and not
because you fell asleep.

Jack Kerouac: A Manifesto

2009-03-11T19:36:00.001-05:00

don’t wait for words – sketch memories
of work money love sex art and holiness
about dreaming and the immensity of it

be alone sometimes remember
to breathe – like a jazz musician
breathe confess and sing yourself

write what conscious art would censor
until you are empty and your heart breaks
you will be nothing and perfect in emptiness

you don’t know what’s going to happen
nobody knows besides that we’re all
gonna die and the loneliness of it

everything is holy it is not even happening
you and I and the stars and the earth
and the father we never found will be okay

Edward Hopper, ‘People in the Sun’ (1960)

2009-03-10T17:22:00.011-05:00

At least the men and women are honest.
At least their stiff separateness

Does not simulate interest
In the coming or leaving of the sun.

The settled light reveals barrenness:
They and the concrete lack even thirst.

It is true their bodies cast shadows.
One, in the corner, is holding a story –

If yelled, its words may be the first sound
To resonate across the obscure mountains.

Luca Giordano, ‘The Abduction of the Sabine Women’ (1675/80)

2009-02-18T00:17:00.011-06:00

Columns, stairs, helmets
on turned heads,
insistently blue skirt:
all are man-made

like the chaos giving
that woman’s face
the look of a dumb
slaughtered lamb.

In another place, music plays
where husbands dance
on a floor crowded
by equally as many limbs.

There no man snarls, hair torn
by an ogre-eyed mother
while his hands clutch
a daughter’s neck and leg.

Husband

2009-02-10T15:53:00.006-06:00

was a nice old man you
didn’t meet him he
was nice I remember no you don't he
died long before you
came here he
took real good care of you yes he
did he
was good to me and I - my
sister was 60 she
was young how old was he
55 so young can you
imagine how young can you
even try how long has it been that’s got to be a long time long ago he
was not here you
at the same time as you you you you

Sight

2009-02-04T14:57:00.007-06:00

Many
white clouds on the
mountains. Sunlight reflects
off the snow: each bird must squint its
small eyes.

Clerihew

2009-02-04T14:57:00.005-06:00

Michel de Montaigne
likes to build trains
and eats donut holes
like the devil does souls.

Bob Dylan
can't be helped by penicillin:
there is no cure
for the Never Ending Tour.

David Foster Wallace
was one of all of us
caught in the infinite
jest of it.

Wish

2009-01-21T17:11:00.003-06:00

Unease
spreads through my heart
like sweetness through a ripe
pear. Learn from the silent star we
circle.

Bill Evans - Alone

2008-12-14T23:52:00.009-06:00

No one knows
better than the player
how the left hand
is only an imitation of the bass.

Sunshine appears twice,
but never laughter.
He is too serious,
the critics say:

whimpering through
a rainy day
as though it were
a terrible flood.

The rhythm is
uncomfortably accurate.
Listeners should know
they are intruding,

how difficult it is
to speak.

This Is Why I Can't Progress

2008-11-26T22:07:00.004-06:00

Gravity slips, and the universe is born:
A comic display of Difference.

Liquid is not a solid.
Earth is not sky.

Wind is air
That is not at rest.

Waves are the patterned presence
And absence of water on the shore.

The most we can say is,
‘I will never leave you.’

Home is home
Because there is no place like it.

If you love the whole world,
You will cease to exist.

My One True Love (As of Yet)

2008-11-20T13:06:00.007-06:00

Edward Hopper, Rooms By The Sea (1951)

Without you I am an empty house hanging above water.
Or an armchair, at least, facing the open front door.
The floor leads seamlessly to a never-ending fall.

If the sea below is rustling, I cannot hear it.
With time I have forgotten how to listen
As the sea has failed to unwrinkle itself.

What could a rotted dresser mean to me?
An old painting I do not look at, a couch the color of rust,
There may be a whole room behind me. I have not checked.

There is no one in the living room to play cards with
Or make love to. There is not even blue.
Everything except the sunlight needs dusting.

I have never grown tired of watching the sunlight
Push the doorframe’s slanted shadow from the wall.
It has been three months and I keep staring.

Its radiance
has no longing.
It is and is and is.

The light does not know it is all I want to see.
Why does it guide my gaze toward the water?
Who is the woman holding your hand?

Assignment: Write a hymn with the word 'kitchen.'

2008-11-12T18:45:00.005-06:00

Check out John Bell's chapel. My favorite this semester. Of course, better live.

This is set to Hyfrydol 87.87.D ("Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus")

Come, Expected Jesus

Our Lord Jesus come to save us
At our homes we welcome you.
You will give yourself to free us,
Rest today, let us serve you.

I made cookies, pies are cooling.
(Mary did not help me bake).
See the sprinkles and the icing?
Only for my Sweetest Lord.

May you find our spirits able
May our praise be tuned for you.
We have long prepared the table
Rest today, let us serve you.

Mary, help, or I'll start bitchin'.
Lord, I made you marble cake.
See the cleaned and dusted kitchen?
Only for my Spotless Lamb.

Quiet Night

2008-11-09T20:25:00.012-06:00

for Charles Simic

Old cat, why do you go out at night?
Is it you the lampposts turn on for?
Does the snow fall wishing you will make a track?

The mice have been arguing in whispers.
They do not know whether to worship you or to hide.
The crow seems to understand, but will not explain.

What do you think of the stones in the cemetery?
Which empty grave will be mine?
Do you damn souls when you rub against their carved names?

Why I Am Not a Poet

2008-10-04T23:19:00.001-05:00

Poets listen for the fitting word,
one shape to hold the space
between noun and verb.

I do not listen, I babble
and prose is not formed right -
whole and content like that.

I break my chatter into pieces
and confess as if healing is
certain for what is finally said.

Sadness won’t be said
so it comes back like a bad joke
perhaps made funny with inflection.

I am a priest in reverse. But this
attenuated life will not be filed
quietly into lines.

I do not listen I am yelling
I am yelling with both hands
day and night I am yelling.

On Becoming a Person

2008-08-17T10:15:00.000-05:00

(title swiped from Rogers' book)

"Man will become better when you show him what he is like."
-Anton Chekhov

Carl Rogers became known as one of greatest psychologists of the 20th century when he developed client-centered therapy, and a personality theory. He "was able to demystify therapy" by concentrating on the relationship between the client and the counselor. Sometimes his method is overlooked or dismissed in its deceptive simplicity.

Rogers' starting point was that we have an "actualizing tendency." We need to fulfill our inborn potential. Self-actualization is achieved by the fully functioning person, who "is completely defense-free, open to experience, creative and able to live "the good life"." This is the ideal condition for any human being.

Rogers believed people grow more trustworthy when their experiences and feelings are respected and validated. In a chapter about facilitating learning (his version of teaching), Rogers wrote this about cherishing the student as "a separate person":

"What we are describing is a prizing of the learner as an imperfect human being with many feelings, many potentialities. The facilitator’s prizing or acceptance of the learner is an operational expression of his essential confidence and trust in the capacity of the human organism." [emphasis mine]

Please note how this contrasts with the hermeneutics of suspicion. Freud would be appalled. I find it refreshing. Trust can be achieved only when the facilitator is genuine. "He can be enthusiastic, he can be bored, he can be interested in students, he can be angry, he can be sensitive and sympathetic." When the facilitator validates their own emotions, it allows the student/client to understand their feelings will also be accepted. In The Fall, Camus wrote:

“Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.”

Rogers overthrows Camus' despair simply by acknowledging another's suffering, joy, doubts, and desires. He termed it unconditional positive regard. Contrasting with this is conditional positive regard, when a person's sense of value is entangled in the opinions of others. Socially imposed conditions of worth cause a person to be defensive, easily manipulated, and unsatisfied in life.

Unconditional positive regard is often mistaken for unconditional approval of a person's actions. My psychology class got upset and dismissed Rogers' entire approach because they thought it demands the actions of a pedophile or serial killer must be accepted and approved of as part of who they are. However, Rogers' theory does not require either the basic correctness of what we do, approval, or indifference to it. Instead he assumes the basic worth of every person, that each of us is worth an infinite number of chances.

One of Rogers' Nineteen Propositions states "Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self." Rogers has the patience to not use force or coercion to fix people. Instead he puts in the necessary effort to help someone discover a new self-concept and change on their own. Being a serial killer is obviously not included in the definition of a fully-functioning person. The client's change in action results indirectly from Rogers method of granting people existence. Rogers believed we are inherently good, and that it will prove itself when we are allowed the chance to thrive. He willed people to be.

Elanor's dad defines love as "willing another being to exist to the fullest extent possible." Rogers' theory may seem foolish or naive, but remember: love has never been understood well.

the cider house

2008-07-29T17:15:00.008-05:00

-photo

I am inclined to believe we should not be held responsible for what happens on earth because we are incapable of being other than we are: fallen, wrong, depraved, etc. We can't help ourselves, we will inevitably cause harm and are no more responsible for doing wrong than a rock is responsible for submitting to gravity and hitting the ground.

In the film The Cider House Rules, the characters are confronted with, among other issues, abortion, incest, infidelity, violence, and suicide. Without exception, each character does something many people consider 'bad.' Towards the end of the film, they read a set of rules for the house where they are boarding. It turns out they have been breaking the rules constantly when they do things completely acceptable to them, like smoke in the house or sleep on the roof. The rules are irrelevant, outrageous, and comical. The same is implied for any imposed moral standard used to condemn the characters' very human, immediate story.

I cannot judge because I know there is nothing I would not do if circumstances were different. Child soldiers are just one saddening example of this. Knowing human potential prevents me from placing myself above another. If I lived as my theory allows, I might appear extremely forgiving. There would be no distinction between kind-of-sinners, and the worst of sinners. Ministers and murderers would be at the same level. The hardest puzzle I can imagine, loving people without trying to fix them, would be solved. I would be free to offer unhesitant love to anyone. I could not hold a grudge, be angry, hate, or even to a certain degree be hurt by anything except what imposes itself, like the rules in the cider house, on the world.

Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, "We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world." But the problem with shirking responsibility is that the kind of forgiveness and redemption offered is not recognizable forgiveness or redemption at all. Instead of making clean, the effort is abandoned and experience is made insignificant. If our wrongness should be overlooked, and reconciliation is not possible for what has happened on earth, we might as well be done with it. Heaven, an eternity where there is good, maybe. We only hope. Our existence here, however, cannot be justified; life is endured futility.

A Readymade Essay on Perception

2008-07-15T17:08:00.009-05:00

[photo]

This essay consists of organized quotes.

Arial font quotes are from Understanding Psychology by Charles G. Morris and Albert A. Maisto, chapter 3.
Georgiana (this might not show up on the rss feed) font quotes are from A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley J. Grenz.
Quotes in italics are said via Ivan Karamazov in The Grand Inquisitor: With Related Chapters from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. I'm pretty sure all of the quotes are from the first 30 pages.

_____

Perception is the process by which organisms interpret and organize sensation to produce a meaningful experience of the world.
-Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology

You see, there is nothing outside us, that is not at the same time in us, and as the external world has its colors, so does the eye as well.
-Gestalt

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for; that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage… but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t accept it…. My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s a ridiculous thing, but I want to tell it to you.

_____

How do we see objects and shapes? Psychologists assume that perception begins with some real-world object with real-world properties "out there." Psychologists call that object, along with its important perceptual properties, the distal stimulus. We never experience the distal stimulus directly, however. Energy from it (or in the case of our chemical sense, molecules from it) must activate our sensory system. We call the information that reaches our sensory receptors the proximal stimulus.

Knowledge cannot be merely objective, say the postmoderns, because the universe is not mechanistic and dualistic but rather historical, relational, and personal. The world is not simply an objective given that is “out there,” waiting to be discovered and known; reality is relative, indeterminate, and participatory.

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic…. I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky – that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic; it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

_____

At first glance, you perceive the figures against a specific background, but as you stare at the illustrations, you will discover that the figures and the ground reverse, making for two very different perceptions of the same illustration. The artwork or stimulus hasn't changed, but your perception has changed.

Postmodern philosophers applied the theories of the literary deconstructionists to the world as a whole. Just as a text will be read differently by each reader, they said, so reality will be “read” differently by each knowing self that encounters it. This means that there is no one meaning of the world, no transcendent center to reality as a whole.

You know, dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented. S’il n’existait pas Dieu, il faudrait l’inventer. And man has actually invented God. And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man. So holy it is, so touching, so wise, and so great a credit it does to man.

_____

Brightness constancy means that even though the amount of light available to our eyes varies greatly over the course of the day, the perceived brightness of familiar objects hardly varies at all. We perceive a sheet of white paper as brighter than a piece of coal whether we see these objects in candlelight or under bright sunlight. Brightness constancy occurs because an object reflects the same percentage of the light falling on it whether that light is from a candle or the sun. Rather than basing our judgment of brightness on the absolute amount of light that the object reflects, we assess how the relative reflection compares with the surrounding objects.

Nor are postmoderns necessarily concerned to prove themselves “right” and others “wrong.” They believe that beliefs are ultimately a matter of social context, and hence they are likely to conclude, “What is right for us might not be right for you,” and “What is wrong in our context might in your context be acceptable or even preferable.”

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

_____

In linear perspective, two parallel lines that extend into the distance seem to come together at some point on the horizon. In aerial perspective, distant objects have a hazy appearance and a somewhat blurred outline. On a clear day, mountains often seem to be much closer than on a hazy day, when their outlines become blurred.

they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can’t understand even that, I can’t expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions; I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions.

_____

An object that is close seems to have a rough or detailed texture. As distance increases, the texture becomes finer, until finally the original texture cannot be distinguished clearly, if at all.

According to the new understanding, scientific knowledge is not a compilation of objective universal truths but a collection of research traditions borne by particular communities of inquirers. And its discourse – its language game – is largely unintelligible outside the lived practice of such communities.

Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they too suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers’ sins; they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially such innocents!

_____

Apparent movement occurs when we perceive movement in objects that are actually standing still. One form of apparent movement is referred to as the autokinetic illusion - the perceived motion created by the absence of visual cues surrounding a single stationary object. If you stand in a room that is absolutely dark except for one tiny spot of light and stare at the light for a few seconds, you will begin to see the light drift. In the darkened room, your eyes have no visible framework; there are no cues telling you that the light is really stationary. The slight movements of the eye muscles, which go unnoticed most of the time, make the light appear to move.

Living in a postmodern society means inhabiting a film-like world – a realm in which truth and fiction merge. We look at the world in the same way we look at films, suspicious that what we see around us may in fact be illusion. Despite a film’s disjunctions, however, the viewer can at least be certain that it expresses something about the minds that produced it; the filmmaker provides an often unattended center to the world the film creates. Looking at the world, on the other hand, postmoderns are no longer confident that any Mind lies behind it.

With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that effect follows cause, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds it level – but that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it!

_____

Our desires and needs shape our perceptions. People in need are likely to perceive something that they think will satisfy that need. The best known example of this, at least in fiction, is a mirage: People lost in the desert have visual fantasies of an oasis over the next dune.

He wants to chasten the modern pretension to assign fixed meanings to the flux of experience.… For Derrida, there is no “outside the text.” All we have is the text itself, not some external meaning to which the text points. The “book” is actually our “reading” of the text.

For the secret of man’s being is not only to live, but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. That is true.

_____

In an experiment that revealed how strongly perceptions can be affected by a person's values, nursery, school-children were shown a poker chip. Each child was asked to compare the size of the chip with the size of an adjustable circle of light until the child said that the chip and the circle of light were the same size. The children were then brought to a machine with a crank that, when turned, produced a poker chip that could be exchanged for candy. Thus, the children were taught to value the poker chips more highly than they had before. After the children had been rewarded with candy for the poker chips, they again were asked to compare the size of the chips with a circle of light. This time the chips seemed larger to the children (W.W. Lambert, Solomon, & Watson, 1949).

Different groups of people construct different “stories” about the world they encounter. These different languages, in turn, facilitate different ways of experiencing life. As a result, people do not merely espouse different political opinions and religious beliefs; they actually live in different worlds with respect to basic matter of personal identity, time, and space.

“Ah, you’ve picked up yesterday’s phrase, which so offended Miusov – and Dimitri pounced upon so naively and paraphrased!” he smiled queerly. “Yes, if you like, ‘everything is lawful,’ since the words have been said. I won’t deny it.”

_____

If someone were to ask you whether perceptual experiences match more closely the image on the retina or the outside world, what would you say? What examples would you select from the chapter to make your point most effectively?

Linear Perspective: A form of perspective in drawing and painting in which parallel lines are represented as converging so as to give the illusion of depth and distance.
[Answers.com]

Aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective is the effect on the appearance of an object by the atmosphere between it and a viewer.
[Wikipedia]

Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see it and say that they’ve met, but still I won’t accept it. That’s what’s at the root of me, Alyosha; that’s my creed. I am in earnest in what I say. I began our talk as stupidly as I could on purpose, but I’ve led up to my confession, for that’s all you want. You didn’t want to hear about God, but only to know what the brother you love lives by. And so I’ve told you.

_____

"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live."

The Circle

2008-05-22T20:23:00.006-05:00

The One
can't take
the faithless
beyond this,
until they see.

The faithless
can't take
the One,
until they see
beyond this.

Before the Rain

2008-05-22T19:44:00.010-05:00

Gentle wind
persuading
a dark cloud.

A robin listening
for motion
in the ground.

Smoke drifting
from an unseen
barbecue.

Neighbors watching
the same channel
in separate houses.

A basketball
bouncing from
a narrow rim.

Street lamps
preparing for
haloed vigils.

I'm an english major now

2008-05-13T16:43:00.004-05:00

because I think I always loved was what music is trying to say more than the music itself. Music has justly found its fame for being able to express the inexpressible. In that way, music can do what no other art can. I'm a supporter of the idea that the greatest truth cannot be told or directly (if at all) comprehended. But music is too uncomfortably intangible for me. Besides, I like words, even though I do agree with Nietzsche when he said:

We no longer esteem ourselves sufficiently when we communicate ourselves. Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. That is because they lack the right word. Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond. In all talk there is a grain of contempt. [emphasis mine]

I like philosophy, I like ideas, I like good stories, I like poetry, I like words, I like meeting people, and I find the power of language very interesting. As Calvin says:

I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity.

And that is my intention. Academia, here I come!

Dawn Liquid Soap

2008-05-05T09:53:00.005-05:00

14 fl oz,
that’s 11% more,
and
the scent
of apple blossom.

at least
someone
has us in mind.

Indiana Jones

2008-03-31T18:46:00.003-05:00

I want to be Indiana Jones,
that way I can wear glasses
only sometimes, be chased
by savages, shoot Nazis,
jump onto tanks, rescue
slave children, and drive
the Millennium Falcon.
No, I think I mixed that up –
I'd rather shoot ninjas.

To Matt

2008-03-31T18:10:00.003-05:00

I am confused. I do not
trust what I think,
much less what I say.
I mean, come on,
we dated for all
the right reasons:
you liked my smile,
and I, your hair.
But all we ended up
talking about
was our friends.
That got annoying
once I realized it,
that and how you
always itch your neck,
and smell a bit
like rabbit poop.
Oh, and I don’t like
basketball either,
you can keep the tickets,
or sell them,
and buy another
dumb sweatshirt
from a school
you don’t attend.

2008-03-25T12:03:00.012-05:00

Is it the pitiless,
indifferent betrayal
of the sun when
it evades our night
that grants us
reverence at dawn?

My Generation

2008-03-13T00:10:00.002-05:00

bound to hope’s impulse,
following – where?
change to befriend
or outrun – what?

Good Luck, Conductor!

2008-03-12T22:29:00.009-05:00

The red-faced trumpet sits
in the usual place, awaiting
its turn to sway as every soloist
sways when the greedy clarinet finally
tosses the melody to someone else.
The trumpet throws the theme
to the bassoon, an instrument created
by the sudden collision of a flute and an oboe.
They are both to blame for the accident.
The flute had too much to drink,
and the oboe fell asleep at the wheel.

Soon the swarm of violins rise
to snatch the theme and buzz
their own mournful variation.
The cellos hum underneath
when the narcissistic timpani
interrupts. The insects scatter
from the boom and regroup,
returning in a wild ocean of bows,
and all the brass and woodwinds swaying.
The bass does not sway. The bass
finds the whole thing really boring.

Mercy in the Cereal Aisle

2008-03-11T18:21:00.007-05:00

The box of Honeycomb
looked so penitent
pleading on its shelf
promising in bold
golden letters it was
'NOW better tasting.'
I forgave it of its
less-delicious past
and in a selfless
moment of compassion,
put it in my cart.
I figured it was
the Christian thing to do.

Escape

2008-03-09T13:03:00.004-05:00

If childhood is untroubled
as its reputation holds,
why was make-believe
my favorite game?

Now that I am tall,
what I miss most
is the ability to forget.

"A Song to Pass the Time"

2007-12-01T01:54:00.000-06:00

by Bright Eyes

There is a middle-aged woman, she's dragging her feet.

She carries baskets of clothes to a laundromat.
While the Mexican children kick rocks into the street
and they laugh in a language I don’t understand.
But I love them.
Why do I love them?

So the neighborhood is dimming, I smoke on the porch
and watch the people as they pass enclosed inside their cars.
And on their faces just anger or disappointment.
I start wishing there was something I could offer them.
A consolation, what could I offer them?
And they are sad in their suburbs robots water the lawn
and everything they touch gets dusted spotless.
So they start to believe that they've not touched anything at all.
And the cars in the driveway only multiply.
Well, they are lost in their houses.
I've heard them sing in the shower
and making speeches to their sister on the telephone.
Saying, "You come home.
Darling, you come here.
Don’t stay so far away from me."
This weather has me wanting love more tangible.
Something I can hold because it’s getting cold.
I said, hold up our fists to the flame in the sky
to block out the light that is reaching for our eyes
because it, because it would blind us. Yeah, It will blind us.
Well, I have locked my actions in the grooves of routine.
So I may never be free of this apathy.
But I wait for a letter that is coming to me.
She sends me pictures of the ocean in an envelope.
So there still is hope.
Yes, I can be healed.
There is someone looking for what I concealed in my secret drawer,
in my pockets deep,
you will find the reasons that I can’t sleep and you will still want me.
But will you still want me?
Well, I say come for the week.
You can sleep in my bed.
And then pass through my life like a dream through my head.
It will, it will be easy. I will make it easy.
But all I have for the moment is a song to pass the time.
Yeah, a melody to keep me from worrying.
Oh, some simple progression to keep my fingers busy.
And words that are sure to come back to me and they'll be laughing.
And they'll be laughing. My mediocrity. My mediocrity.

Is there a better way to describe the suburbs? Bright Eyes finds redemption from a girl who looks for what he is hiding. "you will find the reasons that I can’t sleep and you will still want me." But will she? He savors the melody that prevents him from worrying.

See the cry for meaning? Bright Eyes understands the human condition better than many scholars. Good music is art, art is expression of what we feel and and experience. If Jesus Christ is truly the answer, and if we are honest without ourselves, discovering who we are and how we're wired and what we want should unfailingly lead us straight to the gospel.

This means art and culture, even pop culture, is meaningful. Read the lyrics. I know I rarely read lyrics posted on other people's blogs, but try it for me.

Engage culture. Listen.

Why does he love the kids kicking rocks who have little material possessions? The language he doesn't understand, is he speaking of Spanish or does he not understand the "language" of real happiness? "on their faces just anger or disappointment," why would these people need consolation? What does it mean to be "lost in their houses"? What is the light? Why does he find hope because someone is searching his drawers, finding the things that keep him up at night, finding who he is? Why does he doubt she will want him afterwards? She can sleep in his bed, but why will she pass through like a dream? Why will he make it easy for her to merely pass by? Why does he need to occupy his mind? It's distraction - from what? He wrote about the suburbs, the emptiness, and the "words that are sure to come back." They'll come back laughing. Why? Is it an ironic laugh because the story of those in the suburbs is about him? His mediocrity? His disconnect and feeling that everything he touches, including his relationship with the girl, is dusted spotless till he starts to believe he hasn't touched anything at all?

Books

2007-11-14T21:57:00.000-06:00

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,

straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

-Billy Collins

Currently, I am at the library studying in a dark, evacuated campus... sweet. I like books where you can almost hear what is happening.

In a Dark Time

2007-10-20T14:55:00.001-05:00

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

-Theodore Roethke